Signifying Everything

The politics of friendship

Google Plus, posing a challenge to Facebook, puts a different cultural model of friendship centre stage – highlighting the political and constructed nature of friendship itself.

Facebook, broadly speaking, applies a democratic model of friendship. As with democratic politics, the idea here is to accumulate friends (read ‘votes’): the more, the better. Number is important – as with the democratic politician who needs to win elections. And friendship is about the crowd or network: the critical mass that brings power, recognition and validation in a democratic society.

As part of this system, all friends are equal. There’s nothing to distinguish the best friend from the long-forgotten acquaintance on a person’s Facebook page. The friendship group is an abstract accumulation in which every name carries the same apparent value.

But friendship isn’t always a classless society. What about the rigorous hierarchy children introduce into their friendship networks – where there’s a ‘best friend’, a ‘second-best friend’ and even a ‘third-best friend’? These intricate distinctions may fade as we mature beyond the age of five, but friendship remains tiered.

Aristotle believed that friendship involved inevitable acts of selection, inclusion and exclusion – and that true friends are rare. He also described the principle of ‘testing’ in friendship, which, to prove itself, has to survive ordeals and difficulties over time. It’s a minimising way to approach social life, at odds with Facebook-style accretion.

In fact, set against these ideas, the quantitative perspective on friendship tends to cancel itself out. Paradoxically, ‘many friends’ can end up meaning ‘no real friends’. According to this political view, a long list of Facebook friends would symbolise not strength but a weak, diluted social base. Friendship is instead signified by rarity and scarcity – the ‘select few’.

In democratic societies, however, there’s an in-built suspicion of the idea of the ‘select few’, which tends to be denigrated as the clique, coterie or cabal (all coded ‘aristocratic’). But it’s back – in Google Plus’s alternative take on social networking which applies just this model.

With its Circles and Huddles, Google Plus puts the selectivity back into friendship. And while its overt discourse centres on privacy – different audiences for different information – its boundaries also bring with them the more troublesome ‘unspoken’ of preferential hierarchies and exclusions. Do classical friendship structures inevitably end up conspiring against the codes of democracy?

Title and Aristotle references from Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (1994)